This is truly just a lament.

Everyone loves RSS. Everyone, that is, besides the folks behind Apple Mail. They have only added support for RSS to the most recent branch of Mail.app distributed with OS 10.5 Leopard. Unless you upgrade to Leopard: no RSS through email for you. Even if you do upgrade to Leopard, you will find that not all RSS feeds can immediately be read by Mail. Sadness!

This post provides two things:

1. An alternative to Apple Mail for Tiger users
2. Trickery that lets Leopard users expand the number of RSS feeds they can import into Apple Mail

1. Alternative for Tiger Users: Your only hope for RSS in your inbox is to abandon Apple Mail, thus you will likely pick up Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Transferring email between clients is painful and tedious business. I’m sorry. At least Thunderbird email client is cool. On top of everything, it is a particular pain to transfer email from Tiger’s version of Mail.app, and as usual the internet documentation is sparse and scattered. However, RTFA readers get an exclusive howto in this post: RTFA: OSX Tiger: Import email from Apple Mail 2.1 to Thunderbird 2.0
2. Trickery for Leopard Users: Do not fear! The method is quite hackish, but you can import more RSS feeds into your Leopard Apple Mail than you thought you could! This website provides a great howto:

   RTFA: http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/08/how-to-import-r…

   It involves a little jimmy-rigging and taking the long route but it is possible.

   If you haven’t already, hop on over to Mozilla’s home page and download yourself a copy of Firefox. Once you have Firefox loaded visit their extensions page and install Sage, an RSS aggregator plugin for the Firefox browser.

   After it is installed the Sage plugin logo will now be present in your menu bar. Export your subscriptions from your current feed aggregator as an OPML file. Once that is done simply click the Sage plugin toolbar icon and select the “OPML Import/Export” item in the options menu. Locate your subscriptions file and import them into Sage.

   At this point you will notice that your feeds are now stored as bookmark files inside of a Sage directory in your bookmarks menu. Select “organize bookmarks” from the Firefox bookmarks menu and then select “export” from the File menu. This will place a bookmarks.html file on your desktop.

   You are now ready to open up Safari. Select “Import Bookmarks” from Safari’s file menu and bring your recently exported Firefox bookmarks into Safari. A newly imported folder named “sage feeds” will now be added to your bookmarks. Weed out your other Firefox bookmarks leaving only the Sage directory and add it to your bookmarks menu.

   This is the point in which it gets a bit scary. Make sure you select Safari as the default RSS feed reader in Safari’s preference panel, other wise this will not work. You will now browse to the sage feeds directory in your bookmarks menu and select “Open in Tabs”…. Safari may take a few minutes to finish this task. It is important that you complete this step …

   Import RSS Subscriptions into Apple Mail After this is completed close Safari and open up Mail. At the bottom of the screen click the + and select “Add RSS Feeds”. In the pane that pops up, select “Browse RSS feeds in Safari Bookmarks”. At this point it is as simple as select the feeds you want to bring into Mail. After they are imported you can delete the feeds from your Safari bookmarks, and remove Sage as well.

So that’s the current state of RSS in Apple Mail. Scandalous!